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Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?

27 points by sharmi ↗ HN
I am quite upto setting up dkim, mx records, etc. But once setup I would prefer to not meddle much andlet itrun on auto pilot.

Does "Mail In A Box" fit this use case or is there a better alternative?

24 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] thread
olivierduval
I tried some stacks and now am running docker+mailu image on a 5€/month VPS... simple to configure and fully operational. You might give it a try
sharmi
Thank you olivier, dockerized mailu sounds great.
0xADD1E
I'm also running this setup. Works near-flawlessly for hosting my dozen or so personal email categories
codegeek
Yea MailInaBox looks good even though I have not used it yet.
sybercecurity
Looks like MailInABox is postfix/dovecot at its core, with a wrapper to make it easier for SMTP non-experts (which is nice).
matt_the_bass
I’m curious about your usecase/motivation. Would you mind sharing?
sharmi
I am setting up mail for my business. I do not want to go the gmail route. I also happen to have a VPS server free to use. I have seen the occasional gmail alternative threads and the more rare self hosted mail threads here on HN. Maybe I have been swayed by the arguments in those threads ;) . I wanted to know if there is a stable mail server that I can run on my own machine, without putting too much effort after the initial setup.
cweagans
> I do not want to go the gmail route.

I have no horse in this race, but I'm curious about why you wouldn't want to use GSuite or whatever they're calling it now. It's a really solid offering, especially for the price.

adetrest
Probably not having your data on us soil, privacy, ethics (not giving Google more money/data than you have to)
matt_the_bass
Thanks!

How do you plan to address other mail servers classifying yours as span since you don’t have a reliable history?

ArtWomb
Haven't tried it myself, but this was recently posted on here

https://thehelm.com/

A lot of clients ask for domain specific email services. I use and recommend G-Suite. But it would be nice to have options ;)

cweagans
> But once setup I would prefer to not meddle much andlet itrun on auto pilot.

This is not a realistic expectation. Running a mail server is pretty difficult, especially if you're doing it on some public cloud offering. Even just keeping your IP off of blacklists can be frustrating and time consuming.

Highly recommend letting someone else deal with that problem. I've been happily using Migadu (https://www.migadu.com/) for a while. Maybe that's a good solution for you too.

shabinesh
I have been using selfhosted email for over 2 years now. mail in a box once setup I haven't done anything! other than occasional updates from the admin interface.
the_common_man
Cloudron.io works pretty great as it automated all the DNS setup. It also gives you the option to run other apps like GitLab, Rocket.Chat etc as well.
parliament32
I've just been using Postfix+Dovecot for years now and, initial setup aside, it kinda "just works". I can't remember the last time I had to actually do any maintenance other than security patches, it must be over a year ago now.
dewey
As you mention in another comment that it's for your business and you don't want to spend time maintaining it once it's running I'd strongly suggest not to go that route and pay someone to do the work for you.

If you do it for your personal email, experimenting around is probably fine for a while but for a business working email is mission critical. Mails getting stuck in filters somewhere, clients not seeing your emails because they got classified as spam along the way will just cost you money and will cause headaches.

Just go with GSuite or Fastmail Business if you don't like Google.

beatgammit
Tutanota is a pretty good deal, and it's open source, so that's neat. You get the bonus that all internal communication can be encrypted.
dyeje
Just use a paid service. If you have to spend more than hour setting up your own mail server then you already spent more on labor than a year of Mailgun.
scalaris373
I use Zimbra. I've been running it as a selfhosted service for 8 years now. It does need quite a powerful server (it's written in Java, so it needs lots of RAM), but it works wonderfully, and their web interface is just great!

Maintenance is quite simple, just install updated versions when they come out, I haven't had any problems with it.

Regarding mobile integration, I use Android. Any IMAP client will sync mail correctly, Zcal and Zcard for synchronizing calendar and contacts.

Spakman
I've had very positive experiences with Mail-in-a-Box for exactly the sort of situation you describe. I think it's a great project that pulls together other packages very nicely.

I was fed up with configuring everything constantly and tuning this, that and the other. These sort of threads always seem to have plenty of people who have a bad time running their own mailserver (and of course your mileage may vary), but I don't really have to touch it at all.

nil_pointer
If privacy is the concern, I recommend checking out tutanota.com and Protonmail. Neither are self-hosted solutions, but they'll give you the ability to use your domain, have an org and both have good (proprietary) Android/iOS clients.
ntw1103
I have been using https://iredmail.com/ for five and a half years. The only issue I have had, is fail2ban being slightly more aggressive than needed.